Patients, some wrapped in blankets that look like they came from home, moan in their beds. What appears to be medical tubing and a wad of gauze or paper towels litter the floor of San Giuliano public hospital, which treats coronavirus patients in a bleak town in Italy’s Neapolitan hinterland, AP/UNB.
In another surreptitiously filmed scene, 15 kilometers (9 miles) away in Naples, an elderly man suspected of having COVID-19 takes his last, labored breaths in a bathroom at the emergency room of Cardarelli Hospital, his undignified end memorialized on a phone camera by a fellow patient and posted online.
Meanwhile, outside the ER entrance for Cardarelli, the main health care facility for densely populated Naples, those desperate for oxygen for loved ones line up in their cars, waiting for nurses to bring tanks of the life-saving element to ailing passengers anxious to enter the crowded ER.
The pandemic, which has killed more than 46,000 people in Italy, has heightened the urgency of the plight of those seeking medical care in public hospitals in the country’s economically underdeveloped south. But these glimpsed moments of drama, while shocking, are nothing new to people here who depend on such care.
In late September, as coronavirus infections surged in Italy after a summer decline, prosecutors put 17 hospital managers and workers under investigation for an insect infestation at a Naples hospital. Cardarelli, meanwhile, was once accused by the consumer group Codacons of leaving patients crowded in corridors like they were “old boxes.” Naples prosecutors are investigating the bathroom death at Cardarelli, and the hospital’s director has ordered an internal probe. At San Giuliano, hospital officials declined to speak to an AP reporter who visited Saturday, and there was no immediate answer at the hospital’s administrative office on Tuesday evening.
Many in the Naples area resign themselves to what the La Repubblica newspaper denounced as hellish, “Dantesque” waits to receive treatment for COVID-19. Others bundle up their loved ones and head north, where Italian health care enjoys a better reputation — but many hospitals there are also overwhelmed.
Lombardy in the north is again the epicenter of Italy’s latest coronavirus outbreak, as it was when the virus first hit Europe. In the regional capital of Milan, coronavirus infections rampaged through the city’s most prestigious home for the elderly early in the pandemic.
In the spring, a severe nationwide lockdown meant that while the north suffered the brunt, the south was largely spared. But now, the virus is hitting several regions hard at once — a phenomenon seen in other European countries.
With the Campania region that surrounds Naples now under strain, at least 116 patients sought treatment this month in neighboring Lazio, at Formia’sDonoSvizzero hospital. Some had tested positive for the virus, while others had other ailments and feared becoming infected with the virus in the area’s chaotic emergency rooms.
“If patients knock on the door, it’s open,” Paolo Nucero, head of the Formia hospital’s emergency room, told Italian state television. “At the moment, we’re holding up. But if we have a super flood, we will start suffering.”
